In October 2015, the Amman-based online media platform 7iber published an article entitled “How reading Jordanian literature has become nearly impossible.” The article explores the paucity of works by Jordanian authors available at bookstores in Amman while enumerating the various challenges faced by authors in the country to produce and circulate their work. Chief among these challenges is the lack of resources for the writing profession or, as the article’s author contends, the fact that writers are “left behind, alone in the wake of capitalism.” This paper argues that despite the aforementioned economic challenges and lack of institutional support—whether government or private—authors and readers alike in Jordan have created and shaped their own spaces for literary production, consumption, and engagement. These spaces, moreover, do not exist in isolation but rather coalesce to form infrastructures that facilitate meaningful encounters among members of a broadly defined literary community—authors, readers, publishers, and booksellers, among others. These encounters take the form of book clubs, local writing and editing collectives, as well as readings and talkbacks arranged (virtually or in-person) by authors looking to connect with their audiences. These sites of literary production, consumption, and engagement act as discursive sites wherein members of literary communities negotiate what it means to be a writer in Jordan and make claims as to what constitutes “Jordanian literature,” if such a categorization is even deemed possible. However, these discursive sites are not bound by the disciplinary confines of literary criticism and theory. Rather, for writers and readers, literature serves as a framework through which individuals can articulate their positions toward state-sanctioned narratives of history, discourses about nationalism as “invented,” economic marginalization, foreign imports and influences, as well as Jordan’s role within the Arab world and globally. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews and participant observation within varied literary communities in Jordan alongside theories of cultural production, this paper argues that literature is not epiphenomenal to the power and social structures in Jordan. Rather, discussions of literature in Jordan are sites of narrative contention—over identity, capital, and the state—among different actors and institutions.